News: REGARDING MEMBERSHIP ON THIS FORUM: Due to spam, our server has disabled the forum software to gain membership. The only way to become a new member is for you to send me a private e-mail with your preferred screen name (we prefer you use your real name, or some variant there-of), and email adress you would like to have associated with the account. -- Send the information to: Russ at finescalerr@msn.com

I would have prefered a somewhat harder wood with less grain. I have used birch with great results on some other projects. Perhaps it is time to get a Byrnes table saw and start ripping my own stripwood.

Logged

Regards, Hauk--"I believe in the wasted years of work." -Wislawa Szymborska

If anybody is interested in an excellent wood that has virtually NO grain, then look no further than any of the different species of MYRTLE.

You can sand it to an excellent finish before painting, you can turn it, drill it, carve it, even use a Dremel with a dentists bur and the wood stays together, no splintering or cracking.

You have to do something really bad to destroy this stuff, it is a hard wood, but it's one of the softer varieties of the hard wood family.

The worst that I can do to it, is if I let my fingernails grow too long and when you squeeze the timber to hold onto it while attacking it with a file, then you can leave fingernail marks in the surface.

So instead of using any timber that has a god awful grain in it, go try this stuff -------------- MYRTLE, --- you will be amazed

Once you get the Byrnes Saw, you'll wonder why you waited so long. Get the micrometer attachment and 0" clearance insets at the same time and your model making will advance quickly. With practice you can repeat almost all of the same things you can do on a large saw on it. My only wish is that mine was able to take a dado head.

Victor Machine in NYC (http://www.victornet.com/index.html) has very affordable metal cutting blades which fit it as well as a broad supply of metal working tools which are quite useful.

As you can see, it has virtually NO ugly out of scale pores in the surface, it can be used from 1/12th scale, all the way down to 1/75th, and still look as if it's true to scale.I do not know of any other wood species, that has this marvellous property. If trying to use Oak for 1/35th scale, then the open pores in the timber make it look ridiculous and way out of scale. This stuff does not have pores that look ridiculous, in any scale.

It is called Beech Myrtle or Myrtle Beech as well, not sure of what species of this type of timber that you would have in the Northern Hemisphere.

It's used for furniture mainly, sometimes for flooring, but to me it's a bit soft for flooring as it will mark, can't imagine what a polished floor would look like, after a set of stiletto heels had been across/over it.

If anybody has a Wholesale Timber merchant nearby, then possibly go have a chat with some knowledgable person who works there, it might be the way to go.

I buy it in 6 foot lengths of 8 x 3 inches and ask them to check out the grain so it's all straight, both ways. I have to pay a tad extra for this service, but I don't waste as much by trying to chase the grain on my bandsaw. I rough it out to a bit oversize and then shove it through a thickness sander I made specially for the job. You can keep shoving the timber through the sander and eventually get it down to about 0.010", so thin you can hold it up to the light and see through it.I'm sold on this stuff and it's all I use.

Some progress on the cars. The big hurdle to overcome is the etching artwork for all the metal parts. These are to be etched in nickle-silver. Not the most interesting image posted on this forum, but the screendump might give an idea on how I plan to lay out the parts:

By the way, the actual artwork will consists of two drawings, one for the front and one for the back. On the films they will be all black, the grey fill with black countours is just my "working colors".

Logged

Regards, Hauk--"I believe in the wasted years of work." -Wislawa Szymborska